"Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records. It's more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around them - rather than to catalogue more stuff - you can do that forever"----Harry Smith ^^^^^^^^^^ "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old Time is still a-flying / And this same flower that smiles today/Tomorrow will be dying"---Robert Herrick

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

"These [80s hair metal era] were the decadent final days of an arrangement that now seems
nearly as quaint and dusty as the giant front wheel of a penny-farthing
bicycle.... If you understand "rock" in those terms, then "rock" is long dead. Don't
get me wrong: People have made plenty of wonderful rock music since
then. But you'll notice it always has a prefix or an alternate name:
It's indie rock, garage-rock, punk-rock, folk-rock, metal, emo,
power-pop, etc. It comes from people who cheerfully accept the death of Rock-rock,
and are content to occupy artsy anti-commercial niches, to rummage
through the deceased's pocket for useful ideas, to bang together its
bones to make new sounds, to bionically reengineer the body like the Six
Million Dollar Man's, to do whole hilarious Weekend at Bernie's routines
with the corpse, or, in particularly bleak cases, to labor with shock
paddles over the moldering patient, happily admitting that they're
trying to "Bring Rock Back"-- from the dead, one assumes."

Also enjoyed the riffing on the edgeless, degraded version of "camp" that is so ingrained in our culture at this point:

"this is what we do now, we find pop-culture artifacts that Americans
remember fondly, trot them out, pose them in funny positions, surround
them with winking and giggling and mugging for the camera, dip their
pigtails in inkwells, throw things at them, make fun of their hair, and
laugh the way children laugh when they've been told a sex joke they do
not entirely understand. We call this "camp," which makes it sound
sophisticated, but I'm not sure it is anymore: Camp involves a certain
sensitivity, whereas this stuff is mostly self-conscious goofery. And
it's a surprisingly large component of how we look at pop music once we
think we're done with it, as evidenced by the average VH1 countdown show"

what Nitsuh says about the Japandroids record seems to relate to this tenor of triumphant-yet-desperate embattled-egodrama epic-ness that you can hear in a lot of stuff these days, from "We Are Young" to "Uprising"... and that does seem to have evolved through emo and alt-rock to end up at a place close to "Don't Stop Believin'" and "We Are the Champions"